Featured Poets: David Hutcheson and Christopher Reid
A Poet of the Deep Ocean
If your brother had been convicted of murder and was serving a prison sentence; if your father was a “…punctual/ drunk, successful at work, predictable around the house,” a man who “liked to get it done, whatever it was”; if your home ground made your speech recognizably Southern, but the rural working class South as it turns suburb, not some knock-off of Faulkner Southern gothic; and if words had chosen you out from all the other would-be poets of your generation and had pledged themselves to you in an unstinting alliance between syntactic and idiomatic virtuosity and tonal subtlety both book-learned and downhome; then you would have David Hutcheson, a poet of riven sensibility, split between the love of those who raised him and a pained bewilderment at their actions.
But his achievement goes way beyond his subject matter and his tactful, complex handling of it. As remarkable as that is, his genius for description turns it into revelation:
Out in deep ocean the color of the water changes,
Bottom too far to darken it, and once we slowed the engine
To a trolling roll it’d churn up ice and emerald.
Down in the deep there is both wonder and terror, and these lines perfectly embody both perceptions. The alertness of his ear trolls the bottom — and the bottom, as Eliot once put it, is a long way down.
Most importantly, I think David Hutcheson is a poet of such rare self-insight that he’s found a way to make those insights more generally applicable—and not the property of a class or a politics of identity in which the uniqueness of identity gets short shrift for the boiler-plate loyalties and oversimplifications of the politics. Generous and self-exacting, faithful to the speech and spirits of those he loves, in the words of Robert Hayden his work is “the beautiful, the needful thing.”
— Tom Sleigh
Top-Siders
Years on years my father wore the same Sperry moccasins,
spent from salt and summer sweat with no socks, even
in winter while he iced the coolers, tied weights,
set planers for the lines we’d troll fifty-eight
miles off Cape Lookout where the Gulf Stream starts.
We ate cold fried chicken for breakfast in the marina dark.
Puckered skin savor blended with diesel, little rainbows
rippled in the slip, fanned out around the bow’s
light as the boat reversed. Timed right, dawn would break
just as we cleared the inlet’s long No Wake.
The old man then seemed even quieter, suddenly drunk.
He’d check our bearing, tell one of us to gun it,
tell us again to work the throttle with the swells
so it weren’t two hours of punishing the hull.
Out in deep ocean the color of the water changes,
bottom too far to darken it, and once we slowed the engine
to a trolling roll it’d churn up ice and emerald.
I’d spool the two stern lines out just a little
and flip the planers to tow them close and shallow
while Dad and Nicky ran the other two out long.
Old man’d stagger back to the captain’s chair, tell me
to play that Bob Marley. Can’t you see? Don’t you believe me?
Oh darling, darling. I’m calling, calling.
Slurring or not he had a way of saying darlin’
with the r buried, lilting a long, low doll
and pitching the -lin’ a perfect fifth to elide
the sense almost entirely, the same song
in my mouth whenever I call the dogs.
You Can Take the Boy Out the Florida but You Can’t Take the Florida Out the Boy
Something Eddie said while my old man hosed the boat down
one January dusk at Anchorage. He had to stand close and blast to get the salt off,
and on the trailer the hull flared overhead so there was no way not to get wet.
Eddie looked down at his friend’s sockless, soaked feet
and smiled, shivering himself with just as much warm liquor in his blood.
One of her weekends off when my mother couldn’t get him on the phone,
she drove us out at noon, waited three hours, blistering,
before he and Eddie came cruising down the reservoir on Sea-Dos,
life vests unbuckled for their big, burnt bellies.
My father couldn’t hardly talk, but after she’d left
Eddie half whispered that she can’t have thought
them boys’d be so far gone so early in the day.
It was exceptional. My old man was a punctual
drunk, successful at work, predictable around the house.
He liked to get it done, whatever it was.
Preferred to eat standing, only really sat
to drive something or pass out.
He had endless patience for whipping us
around the reservoir on innertubes at deadly speeds.
His mute blur learned me a blank sanctuary I love him for.
When night fell at his house, Nicky and I poured rings
of gasoline in the yard, lit them, raced four-wheelers through.
The staircase was wide enough to ride our twin mattresses down.
We spent hours clicking between channels thirty-one and thirty-two,
thirty and thirty-one, conjuring a porno flick to clarity.
Silenus
Tinctured and adrenal
and leaning on the sink,
I lather apparitions
out of mirror corners
of attendant satyrs
propped against me, swaying
and grabbing at vines
in the shower curtain,
plucking my white beard
into dollops of Barbasol
all over the bathroom.
We carry ourselves like goatskin
bags of wine slung over our shoulders.
I conduct, brandishing
a safety razor
and leading the song about how
never to have been born
is best and dying now
a distant second.
I shout to be struck down
and feel immediately
hollow in the silence.
Liminal
I hadn’t seen him for seven years by the time he drank himself to death.
None of us ever saw his body but Kathy at the morgue for the ID.
His last two years we shared a few phone calls I tried to hold as loosely
as I cherished. Spades with his Oxford House roommates, shuttling other
drunks to the hospital and meetings, his new job at the marina, which wrist watches
he liked best from his collection, how he’d cooked the pork ribs this time.
I couldn’t help but register how far I thought he’d got into the wine
before he called. Far enough to call, but not so far he thought he’d botch it.
I never let on that I knew. I’d always known
we needed to keep it unspoken.
I could keep it light if he could be discreet.
I learned to drive from the passenger side
at eight years old, laughing him out of sleep
and wheeling us back between the lines.
Discretion
The first time my father met Aunt Helen
she was sitting in the kitchen at midnight
in one of her more ornate feathered
up-do wigs with a jumbo tub of Vaseline
she scooped handfuls out of and applied
up and down her arms in grease-steady strokes.
This is where he mimics in the telling how her arm rigidly angled out
while her right hand tended to the obtuse, alien
elbow, her fingers slightly fanned,
the knuckles of her palm and wrist bent
with her thumb extended so the whole limb
looked like the head and beak
of a bird grooming its inelegant wing.
Cousin George tells a story of a Maysville
family reunion in the eighties where all
the men were up late drinking hard
and telling jokes in the kitchen at Kenton Station
while Helen dashed around
in yellow rubber gloves scrubbing floor
to ceiling and muttering to herself
the germs are breeding the germs are breeding.
My mother says Helen’s early visions as a teen
were of night flight visits from naval officers
who’d landed on the roof to recruit her help
in reconnoitering Axis strongholds
exactly where she was not at liberty to say
given the discretion her superiors expected.
Later in life this grandeur localized
to the government installing wires inside her head.
In her old age she’d tell me they were listening,
but she’d say it like it didn’t matter, or like
she didn’t believe it anymore. She still said Dr. Fasouliotis,
her long dead husband, was coming to get her any minute,
but she seemed more and more to say it out of politeness
about us sending her to live in a home.
I remember her eased back in a wheelchair holding court
out front by the sliding doors, the skin of her neck
regal like an iguana’s, lipping past the filter
in long drags on her Salem, telling me that’s Mr. Rudd,
he’s so bent over because he fell off the back of a mail truck
but he’s okay, he’ll have a little milk of magnesia and he’s okay.
She’d trained as an opera singer for a year at Juilliard
where she met and married a violinist in love
with the man who accompanied him on piano.
It hadn’t bothered her, Mary said,
because Helen never did much like sex.
She wore a pink plush track suit, pulled on her Salem.
Icicle lights glinted off baubles hung from the Guardian Care awning.
My mother and sister broke into a rendition of Silent Night.
My ma was off key. Helen listened patiently, lit another hundred.
When they finally finished, she said she thought she’d need
another laxative after that one, laughing loud, with all of us,
until she coughed a fit, ending with a deep hack.
My mother asked was she alright.
Helen said she felt that one way down in her pussy.
God Rag
I’ve given years of fastidious
supplication to the god
of right angles
of the equal distribution of
items in my pockets
of the overwhelming need
to keep the dish sponge
the edges of the sink
completely dry
the god of all
irrational compelling
who lives within
the surfaces
he commands
be scrubbed be dusted
be simply touched to prove
they still exist
he still exists
he who even when
I lived with the boys
was one of the boys
who kept trash
in the freezer
a jug of White Knight
for breakfast and inside
the fridge a single
lonely salad
even then the god
still gathered
the strength of my slack
limbs to Pine-Sol
the dresser empty
the drawers and clean
their corners at three a.m.
with a fifth
of Evan
only then
and only then
in flashes that had
to be assimilated
quickly so as not
to offend the god
would I remember
upending Nicky’s room
skewing his shoes
to sinister tangents
pinning the posters
slant and
tuning the Sony
knob to an odd
volume before
inverting
the system
entirely
to torture him
when we
were little
when he
was the only
of us two yet
adhered to this
our strange
religion.
The Palmetto Line
The fucking strap
of the fucking duffel bag
won’t stop rawing
my shoulder
where it pulled
the sweater back.
Huge cranes slump off
outside the city, and dusk
blanks the windows
blue as we roll
into pine forest
cut with bungalows.
The train rattles
container after container
down to judgement.
Booze-drained,
Amtrak pamphlet
shaking in my hands,
the wherewithal
runs out to rant
against the hell I am.
The judge is some mortal
out of Yadkin County.
The jury peers.
The murderer
my brother.
The train has to punish me
because I love
myself too much
to do it right.
My bent mind
abhors
the courtly Virginian
two rows back
who won’t shut up.
Abhors its mother,
mothering. It hates
whatever it beholds
because it can’t take
owing. It fancies itself
a dragon,
sets smoldering
the immensity of distinctions
it can’t make,
scurries, cowers,
undulates its
little lizard tongue
out into air
to press the edges
of his habitat, bars
and concrete block
four feet by eight,
half-inch mattress,
wide open eye
of the lidless
shitter.
There’s a hole
in its little lizard head
that holds
what’s called
the third eye
although
it only knows
when to sun
and when
to sleep.
Poet, editor, playwright, journalist and cartoonist, Christopher Reid is one of Britain's pre-eminent men-of-letters. Born in Hong Kong in 1949, he graduated from Oxford in 1971. There he was associated with Craig Raine and what came to be known as "the Martian School of poetry" in which ordinary things were described as they might be perceived by a visitor from Mars. His first book of poetry received both the Hawthornden Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award. More than a dozen books and multiple awards have followed, including the Costa Book of the Year for A Scattering (2009). Poetry editor at the fabled house of Faber and Faber from 1991-1999, he has edited several poetry collections, as well as the Letters of Ted Hughes (2007) and The Letters of Seamus Heaney (2023). His comic narrative poem, The Song of Lunch, was turned into a BBC film starring Emma Thompson and Alan Rickman. Reid's work reflects his mastery of the entire diapason of verse, from the witty and joyful to the sobering and elegiac. Arrowsmith is honored to present a selection of poems from his latest project.
— Askold Melnyczuk
From the Spanglish
These are my own translations from poems I first wrote in Spanish, a language I am trying to learn now that my wife, Róisín, and I divide our lives between London, our first home, and Granada. My spoken Spanish is far from fluent, so the original exercise may appear presumptuous, but I went about it in the spirit of those Latin verse compositions I remember being made to write at school - Latin being a language I didn't, as a prepubescent British child, speak at all. I toiled slowly and used a dictionary, then showed the results to Róisín, who is a Spanish speaker. 'Spanglish' seems a fair way to describe this halting procedure. My translations, which were done about a year after the original poems, take liberties but are faithful enough.
Hungry Shade
Even the shade
needs shade.
The fierce sun
sharpens its hunger
for shade.
So it chases it
into the crannies
between walls
and roads.
Growing thinner
in next to no time
it has eaten itself
all up.
Now where are we
who need shade too
to find it?
Acequia
The sun, which governs
both sky and earth –
its distant and minor province –
has demanded
total silence.
The whole world complies,
even the trees
and the birds in the trees.
Just one narrow,
nimble stream
can be heard singing
happily
in Arabic.
Mosquito
A lascivious mosquito
came in the night
to my bedroom.
Even though my wife
was lying beside me
it whined in my ear.
It flew in uninvited
like a dream
of illicit love
from which one wakes up
ashamed.
And this morning
I bear the humiliating
wound of its kiss.
A Bridge
There is an old
and modest bridge
that crosses a meagre river.
At each of its corners
a crowned lion
stands guard:
the weather of many centuries
has worn them down
till they look more like
begging dogs.
Because the bridge
is slightly humped
those crossing it,
whether walking to work
or returning home,
are elevated briefly
before they descend
to ground level.
Twice a day
they can feel important.
A God Displaced
In a city
nowhere near the sea
the traveller may find
Neptune himself
perched on the summit
of an unimpressive fountain.
Enraged to be seen
so far from his domain
he listens to the feeble
spouting of the fountain
and waits for it to drown
the city and all its people.
Ritual
It takes
a dozen well-armed men,
a pair of horses in armour
and a crowd
of highly emotional spectators
to kill
the magnificent vegetarian.
It’s a slow job
but what elegant attitudes,
what nifty footwork,
what glittering outfits,
what an atmosphere of tragedy
brought about
by the simple clash
of sun and shadow!
And when at last
the vegetarian dies,
spilling his blood
on to the sand
like a copious puddle of sauce,
how nobly he shows
that he is happy
to become a beef stew
that anyone can enjoy.
New Testament
Jesus is suffering all over the place,
and his mother suffering on account of his sufferings.
Yet the bar staff keep on shouting bossily into the kitchen,
waiters carrying trays about at high speed
and slapping bills in metal saucers down on tables.
Hang on, though: could that be Pontius Pilate
on his own in the corner,
taking his time over a glass of vermouth?
In the City of Graffiti
History was written
by the conquerors
and published in the form
of grandiose façades,
intimidating portals,
boastful flights of steps
and other features
designed to inculcate
submission and fear.
But those mighty works
were destined to be followed
by the footnotes
that innumerable scholars
with aerosol cans,
scuttling about
as furtively as bandits,
now add to every
margin and gap.
Concrete, bricks
and plaster are the paper
on which their commentaries
and quibbles proliferate:
obscure scrawls
that clash and overlap
in hectic palimpsest,
mounting ever higher
in their endeavour
to reach the rooftops
of pompous, once
authoritative palaces.
It is beginning to feel
like the final days
of the Tower of Babel.
David Hutcheson is a poet from eastern Carolina living in the Hudson River Valley. He was twice named the Alan Dugan and Judith Shahn Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, and he has received scholarships and fellowships from Hunter College, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. His poems can be found in A Dozen Nothing, The Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, No Tokens, and Ploughshares.
Photo: Fabrizia Costa
Christopher Reid is a poet, editor, playwright, journalist and cartoonist. His dozens of titles include Arcadia (1979), A Scattering (2009), and, most recently, The Late Sun (2020). He lives between London and Granada, and is at work on a project of poems in translation.